


they also serve who watch and wait

by tiend



Series: writing wednesday prompts [3]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, aquatic assholes, forensic xenoarchaeology, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-13 22:15:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15374529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiend/pseuds/tiend
Summary: for finish-the-clone-wars prompt 'the dead speak'  - A Twi'lek postgrad student on a dig discovers the world is stranger than she dreamed. Keeli and his men have unfinished business, and a sympathetic civilian that can hear them. Their Jedi's missing, and freed of their oaths to the Republic, they want to find him. Extra gratuitous forensic detail.





	they also serve who watch and wait

Her dreams started after they’d excavated the first few bodies, but it wasn’t until some of the other grads tried to raise a ghost that she realised it wasn’t her subconscious trying to deal with the grisly, exhausting work. She’d heard - she knew she’d heard a man’s voice as she carefully brushed soil off the inside of a plastoid vambrace. The others were welcome to chant at a skull on their makeshift altar. She’d just found that if she tilted it at the right angle in the bench lights, she could make out some of the names and dates carved into the inside.

“Kriffing shinies are always the kriffing same,” it - he - had said, amused, from just behind her left shoulder. She’d whirled around, lekku swinging wildly, but there was no-one there. 

First Galactic Civil War wasn’t even that interesting. Droids, clones, not much variation. She’d always wanted to work for the Truth and Reconciliation Ministry, repatriating the remains of the disappeared to what remained of their families after the Empire had come knocking. T&R certifications, however, were stringent. They had to be; Twi’lek bones were cartilaginous. They were too fragile and the work was too important for any but the most experienced hands.

The fastest way to get that experience was by working First Civil War sites. Clone remains still turned up all over Ryloth, especially now that rebuilding was underway. They’d gone from saviours to oppressors in less than a generation. Most people didn’t care what style of armour the bones were wearing, or who they’d been fighting and dying for. They wanted the bones gone, and burnt. No ghosts left to linger. It wasn’t as if any of the clones had family, or anyone looking for them. Perfect for forensic archaeology students to practice on.

That night she dreamed she was walking through the dig site with one of them, the hair on his head and face cropped short, and strange designs cut into one side. His kama and pauldron were marked with the same dark brownish red colour as some of the armour plates on the bodies they’d exhumed already. 

“This is Flanker. Good kid. He did his duty,” he said, nudging at the half-uncovered remains. His boot went right through it. He reached down into the earth, set his feet, and pulled. The body unfurled itself from nothingness, knitting itself into coherence as it stood up. 

“Captain!” Flanker said, his young face lively. The left side of his torso kept flickering in and out of sight, the charred half circle that had killed him. “I was so cold. Who’s the civvie?”

“She’s bright, isn’t she? Woke me up, too. Bright enough to be a Jedi. It won’t be long now, vod’ika.”

“I can wait a little longer, sir,” said Flanker, and joined the rest of the men standing behind their captain. They were watching her with uncomfortable intensity, the hungry weight of their identical gazes crushing her. Somehow she hadn’t noticed them before, a half circle of ragged outlines and charred armour, but now she was afraid to look away from them in case they edged closer.  


“I’m Captain Keeli,” said the officer, and put one hand out, before noticing her distraction. “Easy now, brothers. She’s nearly a shiny herself. Quietly.“ They faded back, and she woke, glad for once she was sharing a tent. She could hear the breathing from all around her, people warm and living. Wherever Flanker and Keeli had been was very cold.

She uncovered the edge of an officer’s pauldron the next day, brushing the soil away with a sense of dread, and called for a postdoc. Since she wasn’t in disgrace, they let her help them uncover the remains; the seance group had been relegated to bucket brigade and sifting duty. She’d known what the armour markings had to be, but when they’d uncovered his torso she still sat back on her heels in shock, brush limp in one sweaty hand. 

“That’s got to have hurt,” said the postdoc, pointing at the holes burned through his chestplate with the point of her trowel. “Close range wounds like that there’ll be thermal damage to the bone, even if the bolt didn’t burn through his backplate. Very clear in cross section.”

His helmet was missing, which she knew was normal. The CIS would take them from dead officers to try and reconstruct some of the information inside. His skull was broken, maybe postmortem, maybe taphonomic processes, said the postdoc, brushing down the outside of his lower jawbone. Soil compression. 

It was strange how small his skull looked. From the neck down, the black nanoprene and the armour pieces. The nanoprene kept most of the skeleton together, as well as restricting access to the corpse for insects; there were no scavengers here big enough to have worried his corpse open at the joints.

“Lots of lovely soft tissue left in here,” said the postdoc, visibly pleased by the noises that were being produced by her pokes at the flexible piece of his stomach armour, “Might be able to get a pollen count from his stomach, but contents are probably just rations. Boring.”

“I’m going to get us some water,” she gasped, and nearly ran from the suddenly airless excavation tent, where the flies crawled on the living and dead bodies alike. Many of the experienced diggers wore fly nets over their faces; you didn’t want to accidentally eat one that had just been laying eggs in a near century-old corpse.

“We died so Cham Syndulla’s men could get away,” he told her that night, standing in his own cleaned and pedestalled corpse, ready to be slid into the bag for transport to the autopsy tent in the morning. “We did our duty. Do you know - was it enough? What happened? Where’s our Jedi? He’s not here.” His face crumpled. “Help us, please.” 

“I - I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know. I know he lived. Syndulla’s daughter is still alive.”

He focused, and it felt like the sweep of a lighthouse’s lamp had stopped on her. “We were trapped here while Ryloth was under siege. We worked with Cham Syndulla, and died so that his men could live, but our Jedi should have died with us. General Ima-Gun Di. I died too soon. I didn’t see.”

“Your Jedi - they’re not mixed up in here?” She spread one arm out, encompassing the entire site, transect lines, test pits, and hundreds of little orange flags to mark droid scrap. A few were bright red, where they’d found concentrations of tibanna in the soil. The local defence reserves had come through and removed all the UXO before they’d been allowed to cut the turf.

“Our general was a Kajain'sa'Nikto,” said Keeli. “You’d have noticed.” He grinned at her, his smile jarringly white compared to the wider rictus of brown teeth that still remained in his skull. They’d find the rest when they sieved.

“I’ll look, when I wake up,” she said. Promises to a ghost. Unwise.

Jittery with caf and sleeplessness, she trailed after the postdoc and his body bag. His arm would be scanned in the tent, to see if his ID chip was readable. It wasn’t; the soil was acidic, and most of them had degraded. Turned out the GAR had never bothered to record the names they gave themselves anyway.

One of the pathologists showed her how to slip the armour off, and she carefully took off a boot and shin guard, stacking them obediently in the designated crate. Every pouch in his belt was emptied, checked, and swabbed out to check for chemical traces. The postdoc took off his kama and pauldron next, earth crumbling away as they carefully rolled the body over. He was shrinking down to match his skull, the nanoprene layer not longer bulked out by the armour plates. 

“Sometimes they slit pockets into it for smuggling contraband,” said the postdoc, shining a penlight along all the seams of the kama. “One guy last season had this huge stash of drugs on him. We thought he was making bank as a smuggler but he was trying to walk off a broken leg.” 

She wasn’t allowed to help ease the nanoprene off him, but she carefully labelled and sealed the bag it was put in, and stacked it with the rest.

“This one died old, for a clone,” said the forensics tech, who must have been sweltering in their hazmat suit. “Sternal tips have fused on ribs three and four, and the wear on the pubic symphysis. Clavicle hasn’t quite sealed yet, but look at his dental arcade. He’s actually got all his teeth through. Maybe thirteen absolute, twenty five relative.” She looked. It wasn’t much like his smile.

“If you go look at the other one, his symphysis isn’t as worn, and he doesn’t have all his molars yet. Most of them are like that. Getting an age range on them is impossible.” The other one was, inevitably, Flanker. She touched the edge of his ribcage with her gloved hand, where half his side had been vaporised.  


“It’s not impossible,” said one of the other techs. “It’s that we’re trained to give five or ten year ranges. Then you get into clones and most of them aren’t even ten absolute, and the age markers aren’t consistent.”

“You’d think they’d be identical, but no,” confirmed the first tech, who was taking soft tissue samples of Keeli’s viscera for toxicology screens. “None of them have malnutrition, but we think they messed with the growth curve by limiting calorie intake per batch. If you hang around I’ll show you. There’s a bunch already done in the conservator. Won’t take too long.”

“Who’s they?” she asked, tracing the lines of Flanker’s empty eye sockets. 

“No idea,” said the tech. “Some aquatic assholes.”

“Aquatic because they ate a lot of fish, enough to throw off the radioactive decay curves, and assholes because fuck me, there is a lot of blunt force trauma on their bones. Bones don’t lie,” said the other one. 

“Speaking of which, check out all the shrapnel in the old guy,” said the postdoc, clipping up the fluoroscopic results. “He’s been places.”

“Goddess! Right in his lung!” 

“I have to go, I feel sick,” she told them, and went and sat down by one of the rock pillars, on the edge of the site. It was warm in the sunlight, and solid. More solid that the apparition that paced in front of her. He looked like he was underwater, like rain through glass.

“They broke the blockade after - after this happened,” she said. “Free Taa and Syndulla cut a deal and the GAR helped them get rid of the CIS.” Even the most recent books mentioned the Jedi involvement obliquely, if at all, and none of them mentioned a Nikto. “I couldn’t find any information about your general.”

“He would have died with us,” he said. “But he’s not here. Shelve saw them take him away before he died. You have to help us find him. If you take a fingerbone, I can follow.”

“What about the rest?” she asked him, sipping water to calm her stomach. “They’ll be burnt afterwards.” She knew she was going to do it. All the stories warned you away from listening to the unquiet dead, but they also warned you not to refuse a quest. T&R would have to wait. Keeli or Flanker or Shelve or any of the flickering shadows in the corners of her eyes didn’t have anyone else.

“They followed me to their deaths. They’ll follow me past death,” said Keeli, confidentally. “We fulfilled our oath to the Republic when we died. We’re free now. We can follow you.”

He was right. They could and did. Keeli’s corpse went into the research labs - he was the oldest specimen they’d ever found - with a note that one of the distal phalanges was missing. She didn’t make it back to the site for years, and when she did, she had an appreciation for the designs on Captain Keeli’s helmet that hadn’t made it into her thesis, two finger bones in a reliquary around her neck, and a lightsaber in her pack.


End file.
